Wget is a command line tool for downloading files from the internet. It supports downloading using well known protocols such as FTP, HTTP and HTTPS. It employs the powerful OpenSSL library to establish encrypted connections to HTTPS servers. It supports recursive downloads from both HTTP and FTP sites. It can continue unfinished downloads from the last position. If the remote server is password protected, then it also supports logging in to the remote server using a username and a password.
It is easy to install Wget on a Windows PC through Chocolatey. Here is how:
- First of all you have to install Chocolatey on your PC. Basically this requires running a PowerShell command as explained on https://chocolatey.org/install.
- Once Chocolatey has been installed, you can open an elevated PowerShell or cmd.exe Command Prompt and give the following command : choco install wget -y
- Chocolatey will download and finish installation in seconds. Then you can start using Wget from anywhere on your PC.
Using Wget is the easiest thing in the world. If you download a file from the internet, you can open a command prompt or PowerShell and give the command wget [URL]. For example, if you want to download 7-Zip for Windows 64-bit, then you can give the command wget https://www.7-zip.org/a/7z2106-x64.exe. It will download the file and place in the current directory.
If you want to save the file with a different name, then you have to use the -O parameter followed by the file name. For example, wget -O 7-zip-x64.exe https://www.7-zip.org/a/7z2106-x64.exe. This will save the 7-Zip installer for Windows as the local file 7-zip-x64.exe.
Wget can also be used to download multiple files in just one command. For this, you have to create an input plain text file and copy all the links in that file. Ideally, there should be one link per line. Then you can give the command wget -i input-file.txt and it will batch download all the files.
If you do not want to use Chocolatey for installing Wget on your Windows PC, then you can download an older Wget binary from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm. But this is very old version and does not download files using today’s HTTPS and FTPS protocols.